In recent years, Ecuador has experienced the emergence of a powerful Indigenous-rights
movement. A 1990 uprising that demanded land rights and respect for Indigenous
cultures shook the foundations of the dominant white society. In 2000, Indians
joined with mid-level military officers to overthrow a president, firmly establishing
themselves as significant political actors.
These events have created a bit of a cottage industry in Ecuador as social
scientists struggle to understand how subalterns emerged from the margins
to place themselves
on center stage in the creation of the country’s history. Much of this
academic discussion has revolved around the construction of identities, often
focusing on the politicization of ethnicity. Pallares’ book is one
of the best contributions to date on this debate. Based on interviews with
movement
activists and supplemented with archival documents and secondary sources,
Pallares examines interactions between class and ethnicity in the 1970s and
1980s based
on studies of local Indigenous organizations in the highland parishes of
Cotacachi and Cacha.

There has been a tendency among social scientists to interpret the emergence
of the Indigenous movement in Ecuador in an evolutionary framework. Organizations
that existed before agrarian reform in the 1960s are typically seen as
being class-based entities created by the Left who manipulated Indigenous
concerns
for their own political purposes. In the 1960s, Indians emerged out of
the “false
consciousness” of a class struggle to build their own autonomous ethnic
movements, which were then politicized in the 1990s with the construction
of Indigenous nationalities that struggled for autonomy from a white-dominated
nation-state.
It is all a very compelling narrative that serves to legitimize contemporary
organizations and enthralls those of us who live vicariously through other
peoples’ struggles
(in fact, I also originally intended to write a dissertation along these lines)
except for one problem–it is a nice academic model but it does not jive
with reality. Already in the 1930s, based on ideological currents coming out
of the Communist International, Indigenous peoples presented themselves as nationalities,
and in Ecuador’s 2000 military-Indigenous coup subalterns eschewed
ethnic concerns in favor of largely class-based issues of fighting neoliberalism
and
corruption.

Pallares frames her study with that evolutionary model of Indians discarding
a peasant consciousness in favor of a new ethnic identity, but her most
important theoretical contributions are those that extend beyond this
problematic paradigm. “Class
analysis did not suffice to explain contemporary indigenous activism,” she
notes, “and the particularities of ethnic difference had not impeded the
launching of a cross-ethnic political movement” (29). Pallares proposes
that instead of interpreting “indigenous struggle as either a class or
an ethnic struggle, or ... as both a class and an ethnic struggle,” we
should examine how “class, race, and ethnicity are remade by the activists
in the process of political struggle” (34).

It is important to realize that humans can be incredibly complex creatures
and it is a false dichotomy, as Pallares notes, to position class and
ethnic forms
of identity against each other. Rather, she presents “the use of double
consciousness as a theoretical tool” that can “prove useful for analyses
of indigenous peasant mobilizations” (222). Pallares presents excellent
ethnographic data and analyses of political mobilizations that will be useful
to scholars of social movements not only in Latin America but throughout
the world.